Towards a Pedagogy of Higher Education

The Bologna Process, Didaktik and Teaching

Gunnlaugur Magnússon, Johannes Rytzler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000554793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Towards a Pedagogy of Higher Education illustrates how international policy shifts, primarily the Bologna-process, have affected debates around both the purpose and organization of higher education at different levels.

This book formulates a theory of teaching in higher education that is grounded in educational theory, contributing to a critical perspective on current ideal forms of higher education and a deeper understanding of the pedagogical role of the university. It illustrates how international policies affect conceptualizations of the purpose of higher education and critically examines the pedagogy of higher education in order to develop a comprehensive educational theory for teaching in higher education. The book illustrates the consequences of discursive ideals of education on teaching practices and provides a theoretical framework for new thinking on higher education.

Offering a unique contribution that combines policy analyses, curriculum theory, and educational theory, this book will appeal to academics, scholars, and postgraduate students in the field of higher education research and teaching, educational theory, and educational policy.

Part IThe Current Paradigms of Higher Education

1Shifting Views on Higher Education

DOI: 10.4324/9781003054160-3

The University

The university is a very specific and complex organizational phenomenon in any given society. Any single university stretches over several departments and faculties, each devoted to research and education in one or more scientific fields and often combining several disciplinary factions within each field, which serve general aims of education and research. The stereotypical image of the university usually entails an image of highly educated academics, busy teaching large groups of students in between doing research, and writing reports and peer-reviewed articles. However, it has also been framed more ironically as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking” (Kerr, 1963, p. 470).¹

As researchers and academics, we tend to view our roles as almost independent of society, viewing science and scientific research as self-evident and self-sufficient goals, in need of no justification other than the pursuit of knowledge. The educational dimension of the university is regarded as a matter of delineating results of scientific inquiry to a younger generation of up-and-coming scientists, and/or of training young professionals for work where they use knowledge produced within the sciences. However, universities, and in particular public universities, are increasingly pressed to address more utilitarian notions of their roles in society. Gone is the image of the university’s work as something having a self-evident value in and of itself. Universities may be organizations of science and education, but their purposes are increasingly dependent on and connected to societal needs and prerequisites. It can therefore be argued that a substantial shift has taken place in the last few decades, regarding the goals and mission of the university as a societal institution. This shift is often described as a move from a Humboldtian-University ideal, in which education and research exist in self-sufficient symbiosis, towards a market-oriented ideal where utility and cost-effectiveness are overarching values (Friberg, 2015; Neave, 2012; Schildermans, 2019). As we will explain, this shift entails new perspectives on the role of higher education in and of itself, as well as upon the university teacher and the university student.

University Ideal Types

A Humboldtian ideal of higher education can be described as viewing teaching as informed by scientific research results and methods and in turn, research is intended to be inspired and informed by teachers’ interaction with students. Within a wider Bildung-ideal, higher education is in other words seen as a place where free and independent pursuit of knowledge shapes humans with a capacity to develop as individuals and to develop and improve society in general (Bron & Talerud, 2004; Friberg, 2015). This also entails a conceptualization of lifelong learning that aims at the individual’s continuous intellectual development and their future contribution to the common good (cf., Dewey, 1930; Svensson, 2004).

This ideal-type of the university has been romanticized to a large degree. On the one hand, it can be questioned if this ideal was ever really realized in practice or even in terms of the organizational features of higher education institutions (Bron & Talerud, 2004). Additionally, it is questionable if this idealized interaction between researchers and students actually led to improved education and better research. It can also be pointed out that higher education was until recently an exclusive societal function, far from being accessible for all social groups (Kalonaityté, 2014). In fact, higher education has traditionally been a place for men of educated and/or wealthy descent and thus a place where societal power structures have been reproduced and solidified rather than a meeting-place of equality between academic elites and students of all backgrounds.

However, the enrolment in higher education rose markedly in the last decades of the 20th century, in particular Western countries, and welfare states. Although that trend has slowed down to some degree, it continues; in the 20 years between 1998 and 2018, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) estimated the average proportion of the population with tertiary education to have risen from 23.8 percent to 44.5 percent (OECD, 2020). This clearly illustrates the “massification” of higher education, i.e., that higher education accommodates a much larger section of society, educating groups of students of diverse backgrounds which were previously not attending universities. This naturally affects discursive ideas about the role of higher education in society (Tomlinson & Watermeyer, 2020).

The ideal type of the foundational Humboldtian assumptions of free research and educational journeys for individual improvement can be useful to contrast and make clear the current ideals of higher education. As in other sectors of education, higher education is increasingly viewed in terms of a market rationality, a neoliberal terminology, and New Public Management (NPM) ideals of governance (Cone & Brøgger, 2020; Sultana, 2012). Following this emergence of market-ideals of higher education, new concepts become of central importance, for instance employability, market competition, and a new definition of lifelong learning (The Bologna Declaration, 1999; OECD, 2006). Here, lifelong learning is defined in terms of the individual adaption to the fluctuations of the employment market and its needs for qualified labour, i.e., one should be willing to continually educate and re-educate oneself to retain employment.

Higher education has thus become a tool to handle social and political problems such as unemployment (Faurbæk, 2004), or a metaphorical knowledge-factory producing individuals with knowledge required by the employment market (Noble, 2006; Svensson, 2004). Additionally, students are increasingly viewed and treated as consumers choosing services among competing universities, rather than as citizens and participants (Naidoo, Shankar, & Veer, 2011; Schwartzman, 2013). In a university adapted to the market, the teacher’s mission becomes to monitor the production of the university (i.e., the employable citizen) and to provide products and services to students that they find interesting to take advantage of (i.e., training programmes and courses).

This development is a part of an international discourse of higher education, and a societal development that has its roots in processes of globalization and supra-national projects (Daun, 2011; Jacobsson, 2004; Maldonado-Maldonado, 2018). It is, in other words, not necessarily about policy-borrowing or policy-traveling (c.f., Waldow, 2009; Steiner Khamsi, 2004), i.e., processes where particular policies inspire similar policy implementation or reforms in different countries. Rather, the development is an international political project driven by supranational organizations such as the OECD and the EU (Daun, 2011; Friberg, 2015; Karseth, 2008). For instance, the discourse of employability can be seen as a direct result of the OECD’s and EU’s development of recommendations and policies for the European employment markets and its education systems (Jacobsson, 2004), and in particular as an influence of the creation of the European Higher Education Area via the Bologna Process.

These changes in higher education have been well documented by several researchers, focusing on different aspects of the marketization of higher education (e.g., Curaj, Scott, Vlasceanu, & Wilson, 2012; Streickesen, 2018; Tavares & Sin, 2018). However, the consequences for how teaching in higher education is conceptualized and the models of teaching and learning have not been critically studied to a very high degree. In the following pages, we will lay out four different dimensions that we find central to this shift in the understanding of higher education and its effect on teaching in higher education. Namely, a shift from viewing higher education as a public good to viewing it as a private good; second, as a commodification of higher education; third, as a matter of educationalization of social and political problems; and, finally, as regards the learnification of higher education. Finally, we draw some general conclusions about how these shifts are likely to influence higher education policy, which we discuss further in Chapter 2.

From Public Good to Private Good

As mentioned above, the general view of the role of higher education has changed in several important manners. These dimensions have been conceptualized in different ways in the past few years, but among the most important has been the shift from viewing education as a public good towards viewing it as a private good. This shift is not an instantaneous one, but rather a gradual change over time that also relates to developments of the meaning of the notoriously ambiguous concept of public good (Marginson, 2011; Williams, 2016). As Williams (2016) argues, Kant may have been the first to articulate what we now understand as a notion of higher education as public good (albeit not using the term) by viewing universities as critical allies to governments, professions, and society. This later developed into the conceptualization of higher education as public good, where the pursuit, preservation, and proliferation of knowledge through education were seen to be to the betterment of both individuals and society through the development of critical thinking and intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Hence, knowledge was seen both as an improving factor for society but also as an end in and of itself. According to Williams, John Stuart Mill was a particular advocate of this view, as he related the utilitarian notion of individual betterment through education and pursuit for happiness to the nobility of pursuing the improvement of conditions for other people, the greater good, or even “the public good” (Williams, 2016, pp. 620–621). Hanna Arendt further developed the notion of knowledge as its own end and as a public good by viewing education as a fundamental responsibility of educators, i.e., that knowledge must be passed on between generations. In this view, educational institutions such as schools and universities are viewed as something inherently good, which “includes better informed citizens, leading to improved democracy, more inclusive society and knowledge conceived of as end-in-itself” (Englund & Bergh, 2020, p. 39).

The Development of the Conceptualization of “Public Good”

The idea of higher education as a public good grew to be questioned and challenged in the 20th century, particularly as regarded the funding of higher education, the benefits of working within higher education, and the benefits of having completed higher education. Hence, the issue of state (public) funding of higher education became a definitional factor in the understanding of higher education as public good. Questions were therefore raised regarding who the beneficiaries of higher education were and a search for a definition of what “the product” or “goods” were that higher education produced; questions that followed upon economic conceptualizations of the public good (Englund & Bergh, 2020). Is it the students, the faculty, or the society who reap the benefits? In other words, are the “goods” to be seen as products or commodities rather than intangible qualities preserved individually and/or collectively (Williams, 2016)?

The education in universities has historically been connected to the moral and cultural upbringing of cultural and social elites. These have vested interest in preserving the idea of higher education as something that intrinsically ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The Current Paradigms of Higher Education
• PART II Reconnecting Higher Education and Pedagogy
• PART III Towards a Theory of Teaching in Higher Education
• Index